Published: January 22, 2008 03:03 am            

The Christmas, because of Wii, we repeatedly cleaned the living room floor

Well, this past weekend was a busy one. We had veterinarian extraordinaire Gerry Etheredge and wife Nancy out for dinner Friday and enjoyed some Angus ribeyes and twice-baked potatoes and wine and reveled a bit into the night in the glow of our fully lit Christmas tree.

The main reason we left the tree up and lit was that my daughter and her husband and my son were due in the next day for visiting and gift opening and dinner, followed by brunch on Sunday, so we thought it would seem a little more like Christmas if we left the tree up.

Max and Gen (my daughter) received a Nintendo Wii for Christmas and brought it down for us to experiment with. The Wii (pronounced WEE) is an electronic gaming system on which you may play almost any game you can think of.

Well, Max set the thing up in the living room, and we fiddled around with it a little while, starting with baseball, which I didn’t find too awfully thrilling. One player uses a remote to pitch the ball, and the other player uses a remote to swing at it. I wasn’t overly impressed with my pitching or batting. I was also concerned that the players don't have legs, but they can sure as hell run.

Then Max and Gen played a few rounds of golf, and Matt got in on it.

Amber wanted to bowl, and that seemed like fun to me, so, after Max gave us a few pointers, we bowled awhile. It was indeed fun. You wind up and fling the ball down the lane, and it knocks those pins down just like a real bowling ball would in a real alley. Amber's a pretty good competitor at everything, but I managed to beat her at that particular game.

Then we got into tennis, which is fairly realistic, but for the fact that the players don't have arms. Go figure: no legs on the baseball players, and no arms on the tennis players. Doesn’t make a lick of sense. The only positive thing I noticed was that the onlookers in the stands could cheer like crazy, but they couldn’t clap. Yeah, I know: that marvelous sound of no hand clapping, which I’ve heard at many of my poetry and fiction readings.

Now, you have to get this stage set in your head before what I tell you next will make any sense. The television is situated in a wardrobe in the corner of the livingroom, with the Christmas tree on one side of it and the fireplace on the other. We didn’t worry too much about the fireplace, since no fire was going, and there were no real balls to throw or bat or roll into it. We did, however, have to take some care with the tree, since it had dozens of fragile ornaments on it.

A bit more you have to know . . . . The remotes to the Wii are the instruments with which you swing your bat or racket or club or whatever, so you're swinging all over the place. The remotes have straps that you have to wear around your wrist so that you don't let one fly into the television, possibly with catastrophic results.

OK, so we were really getting into this tennis when Amber did a backhand with her remote and POP! There went an ornament, which, of course, never just breaks: it grenades. Slivers of red and silver all over the floor. The first thing we did was make certain that my big brown Lab, Chip, was not about to walk through glass, and then I picked up the larger pieces, while Amber vacuumed.

In lots of time at all, the floor appeared to be free of ornament fragments, and we got back to our tennis, which we stayed at until finally it was time to go to Café Adobe for dinner.

After we got back, we enjoyed one of the Special Amber Margaritas (SAMs), which you don’t want to drink two of if you are driving anytime within three hours.

After a bit Matt said that he needed to leave, which he did. Max and Gen stayed on awhile, then announced that they needed to retire as well. (I supplied them with a room at the Willis Best Western, since one of the spare bedrooms is wall-to-wall gym equipment, and the other is wall-to-wall furniture, moved out of the living room to make room for the tree.)

We asked whether we could go on playing tennis, and they said sure, as long as I did’'t hack Amber off enough that she’d throw the Wii into the fireplace and burn it up the way she did a Scrabble game once when I became unbearably hateful from losing to her so much.

So then we were back at it, hard.

She had just fixed us another round of margaritas, since we weren’t going anywhere anytime soon, and mine was sitting on the table between the couch and massage chair. I took a nice cut at a ball and knocked my brim-full margarita all over that leather massage chair. I mean, ALL over it. Salt, limeade, Triple Sec, tequila into every seam! (To contort Shakespeare: “Seams, Madam, thou knowest not seams!”) More seams than a homemade quilt.

But that’s not the worst of it. Amber picked up the glass and said, “At least you didn't break it,” and then she dropped it on the tile in front of the fireplace. Another grenade. So, the tennis was off until we had the glass vacuumed up again and the massage chair mopped down.

We kept the Dyson Mini-Vac (which I highly recommend) at hand, so that if we spotted a little glint of glass, we could pounce on it, and got back to our tennis.

During the wee hours, somewhere around three, she suggested that we switch sides so that I might perhaps compete a little better. We did, and I did. I started winning some games. I even won a best-out-of-five. I knew that she was tired, but I wasn’t about to cut her any slack.

I flipped and did a fancy backhand and hit an ornament. But it didn't break. It just looked offended. The next one I tried, though, POP! An ornament exploded and flung glass everywhere.

By that time, well after three, the dog had written us off as insane and gone upstairs to bed, so we didn't have to worry about him. But there we were, picking up glass and vacuuming again.

At some point between 3:30 amd 4, after we had cleaned that damned living room for the third time – and I mean THOROUGHLY cleaned it – we decided to lay down our rackets and call it a morning. Which we did.

We were pretty sore by the time brunch rolled around later that morning. But let me tell you this:

We could haven eaten our omelets off that living room floor!

Thanks, Gen and Max and Matt — it was a memorable Christmas.



Paul Ruffin, Distinguished Professor of English, may be reached c/o English Department, Box 2146, SHSU, Huntsville, TX 77341-2146

        

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